It's lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

How it works

Basically you install a tiny agent in your PC or phone, which silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic.

This signal is sent either from the Internet or through an SMS message, and allows you to gather information regarding the device's location, hardware and network status, and optionally trigger specific actions on it.

100% geolocation aware

Prey uses either the device's GPS or the nearest WiFi hotspots to triangulate and grab a fix on its location. It's shockingly accurate.

Know your enemy

Take a picture of the thief with your laptop's webcam so you know what he looks like and where he's hiding. Powerful evidence.

No unauthorized access

Fully lock down your PC, making it unusable unless a specific password is entered. The guy won't be able to do a thing!

Wifi autoconnect

If enabled, Prey will attempt to hook onto to the nearest open WiFi hotspot when no Internet connection is found.

Watch their movements

Grab a screenshot of the active session * if you're lucky you may catch the guy logged into his email or Facebook account!

Scan your hardware

Get a complete list of your PC's CPU, motherboard, RAM, and BIOS information. Works great when used with Active Mode.

Light as a feather

Prey has very few dependencies and doesn't even leave a memory footprint until activated. We care as much as you do.

Keep your data safe

Hide your Outlook or Thunderbird data and optionally remove your stored passwords, so no one will be able to look into your stuff.

Full auto updater

Prey can check its current version and automagically fetch and update itself, so you don't need to manually reinstall each time.

What's New:

Response encryption: Prey now supports 128 bit AES decryption for response bodies, which means that all data sent by the Control Panel will be encrypted with a salted secret key, rending theoretical man-in-the-middle attacks impossible. We'll be deploying this gradually during the next days.

We also added a check to prevent malitious code execution through config values in the response XML. (Issue #85)

Better way of knowing if On-Demand is still active or not, using timestamps from the keepalive pings sent by the server. This should fix the issue that prevented some users from switching back to Interval mode.

Lots of code cleanups, removed duplicate or unused stuff. We're also switching backticks for $() calls, which is much easier to read.

Small improvements to the auto update process.

Initial support for Prey to be run as a non-root user. On Ubuntu we were able to run as a third user with some sudo permissions. Once we get it working on Mac we'll switch over and not run Prey as root any more (yes, we heard you guys).

Support for SMTP servers which don't require authentication. Simply leave the SMTP user/pass fields blank and you're set. Passwords with spaces should also work.